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NVIDIA To Begin Publishing Open GPU Documentation

Phoronix: NVIDIA To Begin Publishing Open GPU Documentation

This week at XDC2013 NVIDIA made one of the biggest surprise announcements... NVIDIA will begin publishing NDA-free GPU programming documentation. They already have released some documentation and more is on the way as they seek to assist the Nouveau graphics driver developers in writing a full open-source 3D Linux graphics driver for GeForce GPUs...

Any ideas why they're doing this now?
Is there any obvious reason for this?
Valve/SteamBox?

Obvious reason? No. Not really. But there are quite a few reasons to do it and SteamBox is one of them because it will push Linux in the right direction. Nvidia has to squeeze every dollar it can out of the GPU market and it can't do that if it's tied to Windows as the OEM PC market isn't making them any real money and doesn't do anything for their reputation or brand. Look at the GPUs you find in desktops from HP, Dell, Asus, etc. and you can see that it's all low-end stuff with the occasional mid-range card. Look at a gaming PC that someone had made or built themselves and it's all mid-range and high-end. People are more likely to buy that high-end/mid-range card if they aren't forking over $100 for Windows when they can get SteamOS/Linux for free. Same applies to notebooks. A big problem with Linux and notebooks is that the GPU drivers haven't been that great until recently. With the improvements Nvidia has made in bringing Optimus support to Linux, it's a no-brainer that Linux users will opt for better hardware configs for SteamOS using Nvidia GPUs instead of low-end Intel/AMD GPUs. Then there's Tegra, which shares GPU driver code with desktop and laptop GPUs. It's all just part of the direction things are taking.

Any ideas why they're doing this now?
Is there any obvious reason for this?
Valve/SteamBox?

Well, it also helps to get this wayland/mir fiasco out of their hair for a little bit. They can let mesa/Nouveau deal with that while they continue solid X support for SteamOS and the legacy environments.